I guess you showed them. When I was a young man, I enjoyed working outside. Ran a lot of heavy equipment, hung a lot of drywall, built some houses, etc. Come home dirty as a dog. But as I got older, I found that I liked being inside with the temp around 70 and a lot less dust and dirt.
Your teacher doesn't sound like good college material. It's unfortunate you felt forced. You have found success though, and at least got a college football team to root for that used to be pretty good.
I have two kids left in this year’s TN Achieves class. One is going to Pellissippi for history (with aspirations to eventually complete a 4 year degree so he can teach) and the other is going to TCAT to be a diesel mechanic. I think both are noble and important professions while be near opposite of each other and they are worth any support I can give them to reach their goals. I think it’s unfair to the kids to think otherwise.
And bad for society. I hate the classist BS like kmf's teacher was spewing. Work is good. Being a master of your craft and working for a living is honorable. Belittling a worker for what they do is not.
I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was 18. Seems like I took the armed forces exam, and they came up with a couple of jobs they thought I would be good at. I can't remember for sure though.
You know this as well as I, but there’s a lot of kids I see who bust their ass out of high school working concrete or hanging rock making $22/hr. Five years in if they can stay sober and smart are running a crew. 10 years at 30ish they are rolling in a company truck making $7o-90K+. Trades are desperate for people who are eager to learn and show up on time.
Agreed. When I was young I was a master at multiple choice tests, because I learned how to eliminate wrong answers easily. This meant that when I took my entrance exam to get into HS, I was in the top 1% even though I was a shitty student. That didn't get better through HS and I ended up with a 27 on the ACT but barely had enough to scrape by on GPA. Going to a private school, theres a weird type of pressure to go to a university. If I could go back to being 18 year old me with only one bit of info, it would be to go to community college. I wasted like 25-30k thinking I was ready for college life with no one there to give me any sort of reality check.
Private schools suck like that; ours, if you went military, you were a failure. Even academy appointments were considered lesser. Still pretty much that way, too. It's gotten so stupid, the seniors have a day where they pick hats, and then wear those hats in a photo of the graduating class. I don't know what the ones that don't want to go to a university even do, I guess just attend?
honestly if i had it all to do over again i'd be fluent in some foreign language and be doing something that had me traveling and so forth. that kind of thing just didn't occur to me coming out of Humboldt. When they'd talk about study abroad stuff I'd be like, "I could never do that," for no reason in particular
The kids at our recent HS graduation going into the military got standing ovations from a packed arena when names announced. Pretty cool. Class of several hundred.
This is my nephew ... spot on. Could have went to college but just didn't want to go that route. He ended up in Nashville working for a commercial construction company as a welder. He's 25 now, been there for 6 years and has his own crew.
I kind of fell backwards into accounting. Went to UT pre-med (because that's what you are supposed to do when you are one of the smarter kids from a small town), quickly realized that I didn't want to do that and was stumped. Actually went through advising in College of Engineering before spring semester, then decided I didn't want to do that. Finally decided to go business school with a eye on law school, took accounting, liked it, and stuck with it.